Tracking Results

[Comm. College Call Center]

I am a call center manager for a "home-grown" call center at a Community College. Our focus is student retention: Calling students at pivitol points in the term. ie: Students who haven't paid their bill, students who have not signed on to their Distance Learning Classes, students who haven't scheduled, etc. etc.

The college is very impressed with the results...however, they are now looking for more sophisticated methods of tracking and reporting results which measure "sure-bets". I have worked in several call centers and I am not sure if I have EVER heard talk about "sure-bets" in tracking and reporting.

I do not have funding to implement any kind of product to help sort out results. Does anyone have some ideas for me to move away from the anecdotal evidence and start working more with numbers and stats?

[Michcall]

By 'sure bets', I assume they are talking about what subset of students are more inclined to stay because you called. For example, are those who didn't activate their on-line classes more apt to do so after you've walked them through how to do it?

You must have a way today of determining if your calls are successful if the college is impressed with your results, so that's a good starting point. If you get lists of students that fall into those categories you mentioned (non-payment, etc.), you should be able to get lists later to determine if they changed their behavior after your call. If you have the reports run at an interval after your calls (30 days or so), you will be able to determine what percentage of the students followed through. Of course, you can't say with 100% certainty that the change was a result of your call, but it's as close as you can get. This will also help you determine which of those groups responded better to your calls.

That's another alternative....follow up surveys. Calling the students about a month later to see if they complied and then ask if your call had an impact on their behavior.

If you're doing this all on paper, it can be tedious to compile the data, but you can get there. If your college has a computer curriculum, maybe you can make this a student project. I've had outbound programs developed in MSAccess which greatly streamlines the calling process and the collection of data.

[pjackson]

I too manage a call center at a community college. My team makes outbound calls to students that are delinquent, or to inform them of registration deadlines, drop dates and other information. I recently purchased a system; phone master which is an automated dialer. It allows us to send out a large number of reminder messages to our students and has reporting capabilities. I also use an ACD system which can track incoming and outbound call activities.